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Thursday, March 27, 2014

Of all the
filmmakers in the nouvelle
vague, Alain Resnais had perhaps the oddest journey, from
rigorous aesthete to director of charming middle-aged romances. These
later films were remarkable, in that they were just as concerned with his
already-established dominant themes — time and space and the
disappearance/appearance of love — and yet they were quite linear
and didn’t offer the sort of chronological “puzzles” present in
his startlingly innovative early work.

When Resnais became
a Deceased Artiste the other week at 91, I wasn’t sure how I wanted
to discuss him on this blog, since his filmography can be easily
broken down into several “periods”: the first group of
documentaries and shorts; the classic early fiction features, each
written by a noted author; his late Sixties/early Seventies work,
in which the storylines start to become more linear and big-names
(Belmondo, Dirk Bogarde, Depardieu) begin appearing in his films; the
first films with his muse Sabine Azema, in which he starts to explore
theatrical concerns (in a cinematic context, *always* in the context
of movies); and the final group of utterly charming middle-aged (and
sometimes senior) romances, all costarring Azema, Pierre Arditi, and
Andre Dussolier. (I deeply love Same Old Song,
which I wrote about here – with all attribution scrubbed by a
later editor of the site.)

I’ve been charting
on the Funhouse TV show how Godard has remained the most influential
of all the “New Wave” filmmakers (he is also one of three
surviving members of the group, along with Agnes Varda and the now-ailing Jacques Rivette). In recent years I’ve noticed that many
filmmakers —especially those in Asia, led by Wong Kar-Wai — have
been quoting Resnais with equal enthusiasm. His early meditations on
time, memory, and identity evidently resonate with these directors,
and it’s fascinating to see their variations on his themes.

Resnais was indeed a
multi-faceted artist whose work showed the influence of classical art
(check out his early shorts on libraries and museums), modernist
fiction, and the cinematic masters from different eras (including
silent cinema). He also was a comic book and comic strip reader, and
made no effort to hide it.

In interviews
Resnais betrayed a self-deprecating attitude toward his own skill
(see him discussing how he does not consider himself an
auteur here). When asked about his strengths as a filmmaker, he often said
he felt most comfortable as an editor, that was his truest
“vocation.” Clearly his interest in comics fed into
that. Thus he was an artist who embraced both the “high” and
(so-called) “low” extremes of culture (here he notes he doesn’t
mind his films being called “baroque”).

Yes, Resnais was a
rabid comic buff who, one obit noted, served as the vice
president of the French comic club des Bandes Desinees.” A
few other obits reported that he was supposed to have had the biggest
comic collection in all of France (as Wikipedia sez, “citation
needed” on that bit of trivia).

However many comics
he owned, it was clear that, while cinema, literature, and theater
were his primary concerns, his love of comic books (and strips) was
never that far behind. He wasn't a “pop-art” director like
William Klein, and he didn't paint his sets primary colors and use
the jump-cut in the comic-like manner of Uncle Jean (aka M. Godard),
but every few years Resnais would indeed sneak in mentions of his
passion for comics.

In Resnais' 1956
documentary short “Toutes la mémoire du monde,” his study of the
Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, he takes time out (at 8:45) to
drift past a stack of Sunday supplements, with “Mandrake the
Magician” and “Dick Tracy” on the front page of the top two.

The crew and “cast”
(in this case meaning extras) is pretty extraordinary:
cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet, composer Maurice Jarre, with
“collaboration” from poet Jean Cayrol, cinematographer Pierre
Goupil, “Chris and Magic Marker” (that’s how he was billing
himself then), Agnes Varda, and the man who created Mandrake,
cartoonist Lee Falk.

Then the leap into
Sixties comics: Brian Cronin over at the Comic Book Resources site
has clarified the rumors surrounding a supposed “script written by
Stan Lee and Alain Resnais.” Cronin's research reveals there were
two projects the duo were going to work on, the first being an
existential story about inmates in a jail in the Bronx, the second a
more “personal” work for Stan the Man about a schlocky horror
director who graduates to direct a mainstream feature. (The clipping to the right comes from this Tumblr.)

Cronin includes a
quote from Lee in which he notes that the second project nearly got
off the round, but Resnais refused the prospective producer's request
to cut Lee's script – given Resnais' utter devotion to his
screenwriters, this sounds more than probable.

What remains from
the friendship between the two is an oddity: a four-minute segment
shot by Resnais and narrated by Stan Lee for the director Jacques
Doillon's political comedy-drama L’an 01 (1973).

The film chronicles
the day in which all French workers give up working in protest of the
government being, well... the government. This radical action is
recognized as a breakthrough around the world (it's not a very
well-thought-out political satire, this film), as illustrated by a
scene shot by Jean Rouch in Nigeria and a segment shot in NYC by
Resnais.

Thus we hear Stan
read out imaginary stock exchange rates. It's a fun segment, if only
to see NYC in the early Seventies. Doillon's film is more of a
joyously nuts historical artifact than a legitimately entertaining
(or politically pointed) film, so the Resnais segment is one of its
highlights – it begins here at 30:42:

Perhaps it was a
good thing that Stan and Alain never got to collaborate, since the Resnais film that most directly celebrates comics, and was
scripted by an iconic cartoonist, is one of his most disappointing.

I Want to
Go Home (1989) is the tale of an American cartoonist
(played by composer Adolph Green) who visits Paris with his
girlfriend (Linda Lavin) on the occasion of an exhibit of cartoon art that includes his work. The exhibit has been curated
by a French fanatic for American comics (played by Depardieu); the
cartoonist’s visit allows his daughter (Laura Benson) who has been
living in Paris, to see her cranky old man and try to heal their
relationship.

Considering the fact
that Resnais was such a major comic fan, and that the great Feiffer
wrote the screenplay, one expects more from the film than it
ultimately delivers — plus, Green was a wonderful lyricist, but he
really was not a very good actor.

That said, the most
interesting moments in the film all take place when Depardieu hosts a
costume party in which the guests are dressed like comic book and
cartoon characters. In these scenes we see people dressed as Marvel
and D.C. characters (the iconic ones, as well as Elektra and the
Spectre), cartoon strip mainstays (Popeye, Olive Oyl, Tarzan, and
Mandrake — yes, that’s Geraldine Chaplin), and animated favorites
(Tweety Bird). The most notable inclusion is a Feiffer favorite (and
most likely, one of Resnais’ favorites as well), Will Eisner’s
The Spirit.

In the montage
below, which I uploaded to YT, I included not only the most colorful
scenes from the costume party, but also the moments when Green’s
character discusses old cartoonists. (By the way, Green is dressed as his own comic creation.)

That must be the
first and only instance of a couple “meeting cute” over Will
Eisner books.

As a closer, I offer
a three-minute segment from an interview I conducted for the Funhouse
TV show with Lambert Wilson, the very talented actor who starred in
four of Resnais’ final films. This talk took place upon the U.S.
premiere at the “Rendezvous with French Cinema” of Resnais’
Not on the Lips.

The exceptionally
dapper Monsieur Wilson (yes, he is French, a fact you’d never know
from his beautiful English) elaborates Resnais’ method with his
actors from the Nineties onward (in the “middle-aged romance”
period I mentioned above). I noticed that he refers to the director
throughout as “alainresnais,” presumably in deference to M.
Resnais’ age — that is not the case. Check out the various
interviews with his actors and colleagues on YouTube, in both English
and French, and you’ll find that the filmmaker was most always
“alainresnais” to even his chummiest of colleagues (and his wife Sabine!).

Wilson provides us
with a valuable insight into Resnais’ work with his actors. Plus,
he spotlights Resnais’ favorite movie comedian (he is a lot like
Woody Allen in this regard) and which variety of comic he had laying
around his house (although I’m sure he loved Marvel too — see
above). I had a wonderful time talking to Wilson, and this is
definitely one of the highlights of our chat.

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Once seen it is never
forgotten. Daisies (1966) is an energetic,
disturbing, strange, funny, irritating, profound, ridiculous, and
mind-altering film that fits snugly in with Sixties cinema, in that
it alters the viewer's mind as it presents a story (sort of) that can
be taken as an allegory for the circumstances under which it was
made, or an allegory for Western civilization as a whole. The woman
who made it, Vera Chytilová, died this week at 85, leaving behind a
relatively small body of films and a very large legacy of rebellion against the
Soviet authority in her home country of Czechoslovakia.

She was brought up a
Catholic (which pretty much explains everything – both the
adherence and the rebellion) and capsule biographies love to list the
professions she had before filmmaker: technical draftsman
(draftsperson?), fashion model, photo retoucher, and “clapper
girl.” She studied film for five years (1957-62) and made some
shorts and a debut feature before the explosion of sight, sound, and
insanity that is Daisies.

The film (which got the full-episode treatment on the Funhouse TV show back in the fall of 1995) follows two
young women as they roam around, causing trouble, defrauding
millionaires (making it an interesting potential co-feature for
Hawks' Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), having food
fights, and being generally both sexy and doll-like, and extremely
rebellious. It gets on the viewer's nerves at points, but is so
wonderfully stylish and blissfully bizarre that even those who aren't
digging it wind up admitting it's a hell of a cinematic ride.

It surely was intended
to be an allegory about the ways in which the average person can
subvert authority. What Chytilová did to “sell” the film was to
make the two lead characters attractive women who are first seen in
bikinis – even the most sexist straight male (who believes “there
are no good films directed by women”) shuts up when the two cute
leads appear at the beginning of the film.

That same sexist (and
yes, just about every other male watching the film) gets a little
antsy when the film's most mind-warping scene finds the girls cutting
up reality itself with pairs of
scissors (there seems to be a subtext there...).

The fact that the film
was an allegory about rebellion didn't escape the Czech government –
in fact most of the films made by the Czech New Wave in the
mid-Sixties were very realistically-shot allegories (Vera opted out
of the naturalistic, realist approach) that clearly condemned
bureaucratic, repressive governments.

As a result, some of the films
were banned, most notably Daisies, A
Report on the Party and Guests by Jan Nĕmec
(1966), and The Joke (1969) by Jaromil Jireš.
(All three of these films are in the Pearls of the Czech New Wave DVD box set from the “Eclipse” arm of the Criterion Collection.)

Chytilová avoided
offering interpretations
of her work (and noted she didn't like “cuddling” her audience),
but various interesting quotes can be found in which she offers a
personal philosophy. She contextualized the “doll-like” qualities
of her two leads with this quote: “Everyone does what they
can to avoid thinking. Laziness is the most basic human trait. People
don't want to think – they can't make the connection between
entertainment and thought. They want immediate kicks. People will not
be human until they get pleasure from a thought – only a thinking
person can be a full person.”

She
stated in an exclusive interview on this blog that the film was
not “about the Czech youth,” as had been perceived. “What we
wanted to make was an existential film and to use it as a protest
against the destruction of the country. What was interesting was that
the western part of the world perceived this film as being against
all conventions. So it’s clear that it depends from what angle you
perceive the film....

“We
thought that the creativity as well as destruction was two sides of
the same coin because people who are not capable of creation get
their kicks from destruction.... The film was laughing at them,
ridiculing them, and I think they understood that. Therefore, the
film wasn’t shown in cinemas.”

The
charges against the film can be found in a document located here. One of the most interesting things about the government ban on
the film (which won prizes at foreign film festivals) was that one
National Assembly deputy argued in favor of it because Daisies
contained imagery of the wasting of food (“the fruit of the work of
our toiling farmers”!). In case you wonder what wasting food looks
like, this is it:

She made one more film
before the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. The Fruit of
Paradise (1969) is another incredibly, stylishly odd film.
It reworks the story of Adam and Eve and has a gorgeous opening that
is pure avant-garde filmmaking (it's no wonder at all that the Czechoslovak Communist Party was threatened by her art).

Unlike her colleagues
Milos Forman and Ivan Passer, Chytilová refused to leave
Czechoslovakia. She was effectively banned from making films for six
years, wasn't allowed to leave the country to attend film festivals,
and had script after script quashed by government offices, but she
stayed in the country, perhaps because (as is indicated in a later
interview cited below) she wasn't the kind of person who took “no”
for an answer.

In the autumn of 1975,
after having several projects killed off and also having found out
that she had been invited to foreign film fests that she was not
allowed to attend (the government would lie, saying she was
unavailable), she wrote an open letter to Czech president Gustav
Husak. She noted that the party line was that she lacked “a
positive attitude to socialism.”

The letter can be found here. It closes with the stirring statement, “As a citizen, a
woman, a mother and a film director, I will continue to fight for the
ideals of a socialist society and will do my utmost to bring about
their realisation.”

As a result of this
campaign, she was allowed to direct her own projects again, her
“comeback” film being The Apple Game (1977).
At this point it becomes interesting to consider her thoughts about
being a “feminist” filmmaker. She was quite proud to be a woman
filmmaker, but the feminist label wasn't one she cottoned to,
according to a later interview in The Guardian:

“[Chytilová]
explains that she does not believe in feminism per se, but in
individualism. 'If there's something you don't like, don't keep to
the rules – break them. I'm an enemy of stupidity and
simple-mindedness in both men and women and I have rid my living
space of these traits.'”

What is also revealed
in this Guardian piece – in which she is
referred to as “the Margaret Thatcher of Czech Cinema” because of
her control-freak tendencies – is the fact that “film-making with
Chytilova is by all accounts a harrowing experience. She shouts and
screams, and gleefully admits to beating up her cameramen when they
prove unwilling to try out new ideas.” (Perhaps this is why she
could take the metaphorical beating imposed on her by the Czech
authorities?)

We know little in
America about her later films (there are 13 post-“ban” features
and 6 documentaries listed in her IMDB listing, but IMDB is a
not-exactly-reliable resource). Perhaps the most bizarre was the
box-office hit she directed in 1993 from a script by Czech film and
stage star Bolek Polivka. It has the wonderful name The
Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday (1993).

According to this review by an American blogger, the film is a broad, “obnoxious”
comedy that is tolerable only because one of the female costars is
“ridiculously hot.” The reviewer notes the film has no
resemblance to Chytilová's earlier avant-garde work like
Daisies.

The one festival of her
films that brought her post-Daisies
work to the American public (well, at least the NYC “metro
area” public) was a five-film retrospective of her work in the late 1990s (that
included her 1966 classic and four post-"ban" titles, including The Apple Game, right) on the CUNY-TV program City Cinematheque.
The piece de resistance was an exclusive interview with Chytilová
conducted by host Jerry Carlson (through a translator, if I remember
correctly). To my knowledge, Carlson's is the *only * interview of
Chytilová done in the U.S. for television. (If you know of others,
leave a comment at the end of this piece.)

To pay final tribute to
her, I have to turn to the prickly interview she gave the Guardian interviewer. In the article,
Chytilová admits to having “recently attempted to direct her own
death scene. At home and feeling under the weather, she became
convinced her hours were numbered. 'I found the idea rather
disagreeable that the moment after my death, I would lose total
control of what happened, and someone would have to find my remains.'
As it turned out, she was just suffering from wind, but the
experience was humbling.”

It seems that, once
Chytilová was able to throw herself back into filmmaking full-time
(during the six-year ban she made works with her husband under his
name and took time out to raise her children) she went at it
full-bore. “You always have to work as if what you're working on
could be your last,” she says in the Guardian
interview. “I want to move on, even if I have to crawl.”

As some visual extras I
offer the following clips. First is Chytilová's segment from
Pearls of the Deep (1965), “Automat Svet”
(without English subs). She has never offered a list of her
influences, but this short reminded me of Vigo's timeless
L’Atalante:

Next are two other
clips from The Fruit of Paradise (1969), her Eden
saga. These clips contain no dialogue and are pure dream-like
weirdness. The Freudian symbolism is apparent (the man wants to wrap
the woman in his red cloth!), but the filmmaking is trippy and
wonderful:

A second clip, in which
our heroine discovers things inside and outside:

Two clips from The
Apple Game (1977), which appear to have been posted because
the female in 'em is topless/nude. In any case, it's an example of
more linear, scripted scenes that occurred in her later work (plus,
again, the notion that she knew how to draw straight male viewers
in):

A very short, subtitled
scene from her 2001 film Expulsion from Paradise.
A film about the making of a film, Expulsion is
another, more serious film she directed from a script by Bolek
Polvka, the star of her Fuckoffguysgoodday hit
comedy:

I'll close out with
brief glimpses of the later films by Chytilová that we never saw.
This is a commercial montage for a festival of her works:

Friday, March 7, 2014

She
was the “anti-Marilyn” sex symbol, a defiantly sensuous creature
onscreen who seemed to defy the viewer's lustful gaze. She was a
“thinking man's bombshell” who wasn't the greatest actress in
Fifties Hollywood, but her virtues as a intoxicating presence
were wonderfully showcased by the wildly underrated Richard Quine, the
bombastic George Sidney, and the of course, the master of suspense
(and obsessive-compulsive behavior), Hitchcock.

This
week Kim Novak was back in the news for the first time in decades
because she appeared as a presenter on the Oscars looking as if she
had had bad plastic surgery on her cheeks and mouth (she also behaved
somewhat stiffly, as if she was on sedatives — speculation was that
this might have been a result of her having a horse-riding accident in 2006).

A
debate was thus sparked on the Net about what is “expected” of
female stars as they grow older, led mostly by women bloggers who
were (justly) annoyed at the many bad “Kim Novak's face” jokes
that have appeared online since Sunday night.

One
of the most interesting tweets having to do with Novak's appearance
on the Oscars came from actress Rose McGowan (herself a performer who has been rapped on the knuckles for having had plastic surgery, following a car accident). She wondered why there
was no standing ovation for Novak – on a program, it must be added,
where all the musical performances and pretty much any
beloved performer gets a “standing O” as a matter of course.

Novak
was a major star in the Fifties and early Sixties, but she was also
an outsider — she was one of the last major-studio “creations,”
remade and remodeled by Columbia president Harry Cohn to star in a
string of notable high-profile pictures (and serve as a “threat”
to Rita Hayworth, much in the way that Marilyn was a threat to Betty
Grable).

While
she underwent all of Cohn's demanded changes — she had actually
been discovered by a Columbia talent scout in a chorus line of
“heftier” girls grouped together to make Jane Russell look
slimmer — Kim retained as much of her identity as she could. “I
had to fight not to be manufactured, “ she told an interviewer recently. This brash attitude made her the polar opposite of the
Monroe/Mansfield/Van Doren model of the blonde bimbo sexpot.

There
are only two books thus far about Novak, and one of them – the one
by Peter Harry Brown in which she supplies “commentary” in
between the chapters – is quite accurately called Kim Novak:
Reluctant Goddess (St. Martin's Press, 1986). It is her
reluctance to be part of the Hollywood machine that made her recent foray
into plastic surgery such a surprise and a sad event for those who've
followed her career.

Kim's “comments” in
the Brown biography are very enlightening in this regard, especially
one about being a sex symbol: “You become a slave to the
glamour-girl syndrome. They require certain public rituals, and,
though I smile and go through the motions, I guess I'll never get
used to them. You have to play a role – the star, the glamour girl.
That gives me an uneasy feeling. Even though you appreciate the
attention of the fans, you wonder if people who come to watch would
like you if they knew who you really are.

“...But no matter how
much makeup they put on me, no matter how much of a facade they
thrust on me, I know the public was always able to see through it –
to see the real me – that was some compensation. I fought, and
fought hard, to maintain my own identity.” (pp 40-41)

Let
me emphasize that I am not condemning Novak for having gone in for
“de-aging” surgery. I am merely saddened to see that she finally
did consent to play Hollywood’s game, and at such a late point in
her life. At this point she has quit acting, often citing Mike
Figgis’ 1991 film Liebestraum as her final disappointment. (She has spoken in interviews about how she argued with Figgis in regard to her character. He disagreed with her, and proceeded to cut most of her part out of the picture. As it stands, my only memory of her performance is a vague one of a quite sleazy line of dialogue involving another woman's smell on a man's fingers....)

In
the 1986 Brown biography, she is quoted as saying “I have also
never been afraid of getting old. To tell you the truth, I never
cared that much about my career.... I was more interested in trying
to find myself so I could express that essence onscreen.” (p. 255)
She apparently underwent the surgery (or series of botox injections)
sometime in late 2010, as is evident from this photo promoting the
release of a box set of her movies.

There
have been several sad cases of actresses deforming their faces with
surgery in the last two decades – mostly notably Faye Dunaway,
comedic actresses Mary Tyler Moore and Carol Burnett, and the Jocelyn
Wildenstein of comedy, Joan Rivers.

Younger,
very successful actresses like Nicole Kidman have indulged and have
subsequently seemed to try to “set things right” by “un-freezing” their features. The most extreme example
found Cher, who had developed an extremely respectable career as an
actress, sabotage it entirely with face work that made her look as if
she was performing behind a Kabuki mask (this as far back as 1990’s
Mermaids,where
she is unable to cry convincingly because of the immobility of her
face).

As
for Novak (seen right at the age of 71 in 2004), she was all the more special as a Hollywood star because
she “pulled a Garbo” and got the hell out of town while the
gettin’ was good. True, her fortunes were uncertain after the
mid-Sixties, but she didn’t stick around to play a slew of aging
matrons, maids, and (the eventual) grandmothers. She made a handful
of movies and TV appearances in the Seventies and Eighties, with only
a scant few (The Mirror Crack’d) being worthy of her talents
and presence.

Thus,
she would be one of the last older stars one could imagine
worrying about wrinkles. However, those who saw the TCM interview
with her that aired in March of last year witnessed a side of her personality that was well hidden
during her heyday as one of America’s top box-office attractions:
the vulnerable, sad woman who could still break down and cry when
talking about her father’s disinterest in her accomplishments.

In
that interview she also spoke openly about being bipolar. The moment
when she cried on-camera was heartwrenching because it didn’t seem
staged or phony, as so many interviews do (pick any of the
many, many apologies made on television by public
figures). It explained why she hadn’t consented to being
interviewed at length in a very long time.

If
a cream-puff interviewer like Robert Osborne could unintentionally
lead to a topic that would make her break down, one can only imagine
the kind of fascinating chat she could’ve had with the dean of star
interviewers, the great Dick Cavett, in his prime.

Despite
her wonderfully defiant presence, Novak was and is a fragile soul who has
often noted that she never really wanted to be a star. She has also,
as was noted by the bloggers who rose to her defense, lived through
seeing her possessions go up in a fire in 2000, had the aforementioned
horse-riding accident, and survived breast cancer just a few years
ago.

Thus,
when not mentored by major-studio advisers — from the nasty but
effective Cohn to her one-time companion Quine — she seems like a
woman adrift. And there we again collide with the question that sympathetic
bloggers have been discussing in the past week — namely “how
should an aging movie star look?”

Perhaps
the only two stars who kept their privacy in their later years —
one can’t help but cringe thinking of the final months of Bette
Davis, where she continued to perform post-stroke, heavily made up —
are the “Glimmer Twins” of Thirties glamour, two of the most
beautiful women ever in film, Garbo and Dietrich. Garbo’s solution
we all know; she simply left Hollywood and never came back — I know
she toyed with returning at one point (with the amazing Max Ophuls), but the project sadly lost its financing.

Dietrich
(who coincidentally had her last movie role in David Hemmings’ film
Just a Gigolo, which costarred Kim) took a
more radical approach. She stayed hidden in her Paris apartment, not
granting interviews and not allowing pictures to be taken of her —
only her voice is heard in the late Maximilian Schell’s superb 1984
portrait Marlene. Along the same lines, Billy Wilder told
documentarian Volker Schlondorff a wonderful tale about Dietrich
ducking him on the phone (affecting a bad French accent) in her later years when he tried to connect
with her in Paris.

Novak
certainly doesn’t have to be as extreme in her behavior as Greta
and Marlene. One could easily imagine her going the route of another
one-time Hollywood pin-up girl, Janet Leigh. Leigh might have had
“touch-ups” as she got older, but I was always impressed that she
let herself get wrinkled — something that is absolutely verboten in
Lotus Land. The result might have been that some assholes made jokes
about her appearance, but Leigh’s face was still her own, not a
surgeon’s “project,” until her death.

For
the male equivalent, take a look at Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins’ creased forehead is so much more laudable than the odd
appearance of, say, Mickey Rourke.

Nathanael
West taught us 75 years ago in The Day of the Locust
that Hollywood eats up and spits out its denizens. There is no better
example of this than the Oscars, a deadly dull affair (leavened in
theory by attempts at “comedy”) that these days allows no time
for an appreciation of the history of American movies.

The
film-clip montages are few and far between, and contain nearly no b&w
material; the Lifetime Achievement Awards are presented at another,
prior ceremony, and aren’t allowed on the main broadcast anymore;
and, of course, older stars are rarely seen on the program.

Sidney
Poitier, Robert De Niro, and Harrison Ford were the only other
“older” [read: over 70] performers on this year’s Oscars;
Hollywood’s idea of “veteran performers” now points strictly to
TV stars who later became movie stars (60-somethings Sally Field,
Goldie Hawn, John Travolta, and Bill Murray). Glenn Close is over 60
but best known for film.

Why
all these names? To illustrate that Novak was the ONLY person on the
program who had a link to old Hollywood, and they had her curiously present the
Best Animated Feature award.

Hollywood
essentially spits on its past (unless it can merchandise it — thus
the Wizard of Oz trib), and we get to watch it on
television every year. This time out a great star who had one of the
most intriguing screen presences of the Fifties became a laughingstock because she chose to eliminate her wrinkles and went to the
wrong surgeon.

The
fact that she felt that was necessary is attributable not only to her
own insecurities, but to the fact that America has a problem with age
and thus does not want to see stars who carry their age proudly, like
Janet Leigh or Anthony Hopkins.

Kim’s
star will continue to shine brightly. I hope that she can “do a
Nicole Kidman” and possibly reverse whatever procedures she
underwent, but even if she can’t she will remain a luminous
presence, and her films will live on. From the terrific noir
Pushover (1954) and the iconic Fifties
“lust-drama” Picnic (1955) to Billy Wilder’s
brilliantly nasty Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and
Robert Aldrich’s equally incisive and brutal The Legend of Lylah
Clare (1968), she has given movie viewers a lot more than
we’ve given her.